“Welcome to the Mozilla development roadmap. This document
briefly describes where the Mozilla project has been, and then
details where it is going. It proposes key “road rules” and a
release schedule for ongoing Mozilla-the-browser source milestone
releases, from which anyone can build commercial and other
products. It also hints at how Mozilla-the-platform should evolve,
again from an operational or “release process” point of
view….”
“The old roadmap recorded the momentous decision in October 1998
to reset the Mozilla project around the new layout engine (now
called Gecko), a cross-platform front end (XPFE), now several XP
Apps built on an XP Toolkit), and a scriptable components
architecture (XPCOM and XPConnect). The old roadmap helped to
effect a major course change for Mozilla, but it then failed to
track the project’s progress — my fault, no excuses. On the plus
side, it did prescribe and promote a number of positive techniques
and developments in the code and in the community. But it’s old
news. Now we need a different roadmap.”
“Going forward, as netscape.com prepares to ship a commercial
product based on Mozilla, we need a roadmap that prescribes fewer
technical points and more planning and scheduling techniques.
Mozilla doesn’t need new features, or any particular “new” or “next
generation” module (there will and should be module rewrites, to be
sure; there will also be new features, but I’m not about to call
for any here). I would do a disservice to say anything on the order
of “let’s charge over that next hill” when we are still finishing
the current architecture and staring down the troublesome aspects
of its trade-offs (e.g. leaks due to lack of garbage
collection).”
“Mozilla needs performance, stability, and correctness. We
are near the last ten percent of the “Mozilla 1.0” project, where
the going gets tough.“